Reviews

Well, the Tacoma Armory is slick.

A Sunday afternoon afforded all the parking you could lust after. 

I’m living a block from Capitol Hill. Every morning when I come home from working the graveyard shift, I have to practically pull my hair out looking for a spot to park a sedan. These are the days when you wish you had one of those tiny European thingies that aren’t really safe on the freeway. What is driving anyway? It is best when it is goingt’the store for bread and milk.

The theatre seating wasn’t really theatre seating but dinner party seating, and the concessions, pointed out at the start, was a veritable Feast, from which I took away a slim can of red wine. 

Also on offer at the elegant concessions were chocolate croissants. That would have been the way to go.

The plays were delectable. Everything was workmanlike. It was a jigsaw puzzle whose parts all fit together. 

Smooth. Aesthetically satisfying. What a great talent pool they have in Tacoma.

The gamut of emotional tone ran from a lesbian couple realizing that one did not wish to continue their marriage; a magic curse of blindness revealed as guilt; and children and their developmental issues symbolized in the playground. THE CHEESE TOUCH.

The Festival was one weekend and one weekend only, so I can’t tell you to scamper down there for tickets, but it certainly bears watching for next year.

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Here’s coming at you with internationally commodified Italian coffee, which began right here in Old Town Seattle. 

Let me apologize for the long hiatus since my last review. I would complain of nothing but work, work, work and the vicissitudes of life, with a couple of moves thrown in. What is it with rent? Two hundred a month more than pre-COVID, and so much demand I can hardly get into anything in town. I am hunkered down in SOUTH Tacoma when I am not at the boat, and, more often than I care to admit, sleeping in the car between double overnight shifts at work, and that is not a good recipe for theatre.

My friend Rose Cano is one of the authors of this piece, a theatre artist with such an exemplary track record for four decades that, whatever may be, the piece can be counted on to be thrilling. I don’t know David Nyberg other than meeting him the once last night, but I know he has good taste in collaborators. 

How to approach the subject of people in Pioneer Square in a musical? That was the dramaturgical challenge of the night, and the answer was, slyly. 

Part of the answer was the space itself, the ur-Seattle built so low it flooded and was built over by the present municipality, with the bones of its predecessor still nestled beneath it. I haven’t done the Underground Tour, and have been needing to. Now that I have successfully gotten there, I can get there again. http://www.undergroundtour.com/about/history.html

The initial plan was to park my car at the Tukwila Transit Center, take a bus to the boat, then a bus to the show, but as I made my way to the Light Rail platform, it occurred to me that the train stops in Pioneer Square, just a couple of blocks from the venue, and aren’t there numerous bars, restaurants, and other venues of comestibles to help me while away the extra hours?

So jump on the train and avoid all that nasty, expensive Pioneer Square parking. I managed to find the Merchant Saloon and have a cocktail before the show. That is a nice way to start a show, although unnecessary, in this case. This show began with a visit to the Speakeasy and a round of drinks already in progress, so I recommend you plan on that, and possibly go easy with the first drink. Just saying. https://merchantscafeandsaloon.com/

The show itself was topical, well-produced, enthusiastically acted, and well-directed. The band was stunning and the singing, Cara Mia! It is not easy to do a musical in this post-HAMILTON era, especially with a recondite subject. How to tell the story of Pioneer Square when it bridges vast chasms of culture, from the Duwamish Nation to the 19th-century settlers to the modern corporate to the homeless to the night club scene and the arts? You have to craft each particular segment and jump from disparate moment to disparate moment. Some of these moments will be more well-received than others. This is especially the case in the situation of new music. So my hat’s off to this creative team for this piece. 

https://www.beneath-the-streets.com/about-4?fbclid=IwAR2sPbzwyz_iw223pPoYrc2FyT7gpNdO9ESrErMYguPMvmqyN7SI_0P1oyE

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There is a sense of scale in theatre, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This show is too big, that is too small, but that is just right. There is something to be said for all of them, but it is a relaxing pleasure when you find yourself in the right hands. You are going to be okay. 

That is where we are with Christmastown — it is just right!

First, the ticket price includes an artist level of $10 that allowed a middle-aged playwright-ish working at high school student wages to pony up and go. Maybe after I pay off my car or something I will go up to the next level, and certainly shelling out $7 plus tip for a glass of wine that cost them $1.72 was part of the evening’s overall expense, but I could absolutely get there for a $10 ticket. I can’t always make the $35 show. Sorry.

Then there is the script, always the focus of the playwright. That is one of the things that was just right. It had the premise of a film noir private detective in a place called Christmastown on the hunt for clues to what happened to “Big Red,” the mysteriously missing Santa Claus. The romp takes us through every cliché in both film noir and the secular Christmas folklore of America, including 34th Street, Rudolph, the classy dame, and plenty of vamping about at gunpoint. It is a workmanlike thing that should just be produced, because it gets the job done.

With a set that cost ~$20 and was probably in someone’s garage, the cast of four strong players cleverly shuffling about with roles and properties, and the directing strong and inventive within the range of effective and usual business that moved the show along, the practically sold-out house, on a Wednesday night, even, left by 8:30 with an air of contentment, not entirely used up, and ready for the next phase of the evening, a late dinner, drinks, conversation. Nearby establishments had emptied out a bit from the dinner rush and no doubt offered seats for the elegant comestibles we thrive on in these works. It is good. The second show started at 9, crowds were already lining up when I left — hope was in the air.

https://www.seattlepublictheater.org/

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Now, first, let me say, I had to dash out to my car from work to watch some of the show on break, but that does not preclude me from opening my big mouth about it.

I first heard about these naughty animals about fifteen years ago when I saw Bret Fetzer relating their exploits at a club in Portland, and here we are, all these years later, the animals are still misbehaving, and look who’s back in town.

I got far enough into the show to find out about some lugubrious bears and the coo coo poodle obsessions of the rich before I had to go back in and work. It was one of those emergency health care “Can you come in right now?” situations; otherwise, I would have been sitting there like a normal person, having normalcy and then a pile of relief drinks. 

The biggest thing about the show was thrown out by the House Manager in his opening speech, “Is this your first time back in the theatre?”

That was pretty much the emotional tone of everything this week. I don’t know why I got activated this week except it’s the first week in November, the biggest theatre month of the year, the month when nice guys come in from the sun.

https://18thandunion.org/

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